Hardware Design: Board Construction
Because of the mis-alignment of the toner tranfser, I'm going to have to drill the holes especially careful, otherwise I might cut some of the traces or make it difficult to solder parts together without accidentally soldering two parts together. Ontop of that a few traces didn't come out super great so a measure of touch up work will need to be done through soldering.
Building The Circuit
Finally, we can start building the circuit and soldering things together. Make no mistake, it will take a little while to get everything soldered, that is...if you are testing after every few parts you solder in--which you should be. For starters, here are all the parts used in this tutorial.
The first thing I suggest soldering for any project, is the power supply. Below you can see the 7805 +5v regulator is soldered in along with the switch, connector and capacitor.
Next, the second part of the circuit should be soldered, the two 555 timers. This will take a little longer, but once in we can test to make sure that the output from the 555 timers is a valid +0v -> +5v signal.
The bulk of the soldering is getting the 74LS164's in place with the resistors and LEDs. You can see a I already needed a few jumper wires to connect gounds, or poor improve poor connections.
Eventually I finished soldering everything and the picture below shows you the final board. It's....less than pretty, but most important is that it works.
As you can see from the completed board pictures above and below, quite a few jumper wires became necessary to connect some pins together. This was not entirely un-forseen as the autorouter only connected 93.7% of the pins together, so it shouldn't be surprising that they were necessary. Mostly it was because I was too lazy to re-route in an intellgient manner.
So, with the board complete, I'm aching to test it out and see what it can do, and most importantly if it does what I outlined in the theory section of this tutorial.
Because of the mis-alignment of the toner tranfser, I'm going to have to drill the holes especially careful, otherwise I might cut some of the traces or make it difficult to solder parts together without accidentally soldering two parts together. Ontop of that a few traces didn't come out super great so a measure of touch up work will need to be done through soldering.
Building The Circuit
Finally, we can start building the circuit and soldering things together. Make no mistake, it will take a little while to get everything soldered, that is...if you are testing after every few parts you solder in--which you should be. For starters, here are all the parts used in this tutorial.
The first thing I suggest soldering for any project, is the power supply. Below you can see the 7805 +5v regulator is soldered in along with the switch, connector and capacitor.
Next, the second part of the circuit should be soldered, the two 555 timers. This will take a little longer, but once in we can test to make sure that the output from the 555 timers is a valid +0v -> +5v signal.
The bulk of the soldering is getting the 74LS164's in place with the resistors and LEDs. You can see a I already needed a few jumper wires to connect gounds, or poor improve poor connections.
Eventually I finished soldering everything and the picture below shows you the final board. It's....less than pretty, but most important is that it works.
As you can see from the completed board pictures above and below, quite a few jumper wires became necessary to connect some pins together. This was not entirely un-forseen as the autorouter only connected 93.7% of the pins together, so it shouldn't be surprising that they were necessary. Mostly it was because I was too lazy to re-route in an intellgient manner.
So, with the board complete, I'm aching to test it out and see what it can do, and most importantly if it does what I outlined in the theory section of this tutorial.